same. This is identified by Hand as an unethical politics and system of
knowledge that denies the way in which subjectivity is constituted by
openness to the ëotherí. In ëEthics as First Philosophyí (1984),
Levinas argues that the containment and mastery of alterity is an
impossibility upon which modern knowledge is based, and he con-
nects this with sovereignty:
Modernity will subsequently be distinguished by the attempt to develop from
the identification and appropriation of being by knowledge toward the
identification of being and knowledge [Ö] Identical and non-identical are
identified. The labour of thought wins out over the otherness of things and
men.^17Modern knowledge or the episteme of Western philosophy holds
within it a ëcorrelation between being and knowledgeí. Such a
knowledge relies on an ëidentification and appropriationí that ëwins
out over the otherness of things and mení with the effect of
overcoming difference.^18 Such knowledge seizes something and
makes it oneís own: ëreducing presence and representing the differ-
ence of being, an activity that appropriates and grasps the otherness
of the known.í To explain this further, Levinas uses the German word
ëauffassení, meaning ëunderstandingí but also ëfassení, gripping or
fastening: ëknowledge is a re-presentation, a return to presence, and
nothing may remain other to it.í^19
As we have seen, the politics of the nation-state relies on
appropriating otherness and eradicating difference as it hopes to
represent ëthe peopleí as a return to presence where nothing may
remain other to it. It is in this way that Levinas can identify a tension
between subjectivity and the assimilation of identity into a nationality,
whereby modern identity politics relies on universalism, turning the
ëotherí into the same and eradicating difference. In place of the
sovereign politics of the subject of the modern nation-state around
which modern philosophical thinking of identity has been based, he
inserts the question of an ethical and differential relation to alterity.
17 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’ (1984), The Continental
Philosophy Reader, eds., Richard Kearney and Maria Rainwater (London:
Routledge, 1996), p.126.
18 Ibid., p.124.
19 Ibid., p.125.